Exactly halfway back through Sandra Bullock's 30

I hadn't fed myself any post-election comfort food until Sunday night.

Yes, before that I'd soldiered on through a good eight new releases, none of the viewing of which really suffered from my underlying distant foul mood the past two weeks. (Fortunately for me, here in Australia removed from it all, it has managed to be very distant, as my coping mechanisms for dealing with this disappointment have been working.)

But having given myself a little comfort food in the form of Friends episodes on the very night of the election, I finally gave myself a little of the cinematic kind on Sunday night.

The comfort came in the form of a romantic comedy in general, and The Proposal in particular. 

Anne Fletcher's romcom is not a great movie, not by any stretch of the imagination. (Which, arguably, might have made it more effective as comfort food.) But it's a far better one than you might think, and it benefits from starring the darling Sandra Bullock, always a personal favorite. More on her in a moment.

The last time I watched The Proposal was the second time I'd seen it within the space of a year, while in the hospital after my older son's birth in 2010. It was only just new the year before that, but I didn't see it until the calendar flipped to January in order to include it in year-end rankings. 

So I do think about it sentimentally for that reason. In the state of emotional fullness of becoming new parents, my wife and I watched The Proposal in her hospital bed -- her actually in the bed, me in the neighboring chair -- while we waited the comically long amount of time to be discharged. It helped pass the time quite well and we were both highly vulnerable to the charms of Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, to say nothing of the ways they lower their defenses and show each other their hidden fragility over the course of the narrative.

I did find myself mildly pushed in those same emotional directions while watching The Proposal on Sunday, but only mildly. I thought I remembered a few more moments of getting all the feels. 

One thing that did not disappoint was the comic charm and comedic timing of Bullock, and it caused me to ponder that it has now been 30 years of having Sandra Bullock in our lives.

I'm usually the sort of pedant who would point out that Bullock's acting career began in 1987 with a movie called Hangmen -- or would have been if I'd bothered to look it up on IMDB. (Just so you don't think I'm the kind of freak who can spontaneously produce the name of Bullock's first feature, made when she was only 23.) That's closer to 40 years ago than 30.

But we all know that Sandra Bullock really became SANDRA BULLOCK with the release of Speed in 1994. In fact, so striking was that movie as an introduction of "new" talent -- even if it was her 15th credit on IMDB -- that she is the person I think of any time I think about movies that introduced a future star to us.

By coming out in 2009, The Proposal now represents the halfway point between Speed and this moment in time. 

And because it took Bullock until she was 30 -- or about to turn 30 six weeks after Speed was released -- to get this sort of role, that means she was halfway to the age she is now at the time she made it. That's right, Bullock turned 60 years old in July.

Even though it would make sense that this is how old she is, seeing as how I just had my own 51st birthday, it made me a bit sad to consider it.

Sad not because I think a 60-year-old should be thrown in the bin. If you're a man, you might just be getting started at age 60.

Sad because as a woman, Bullock won't get that chance, and she has already begun her inevitable receding from the public spotlight. She doesn't have an acting credit since 2022's Bullet Train -- which I haven't seen, which reminds I still have plenty of unseen Sandy Bullock to look forward to -- and though I see that Practical Magic 2 is in the works, I don't have much hope of any more films where she gets to work her series of facial expressions and low-level physical pratfalls. (Just think of that great shot in Miss Congeniality where she takes a spill while walking in high heels, which combines both.)

I feel like a little Sandra Bullock retrospective might provide me any more comfort I might need, whenever I might need it.

But lest my 30-year crush on this actress comes too much to the forefront, I may need to keep it on the down low a bit. I already survived a couple entrances into the living room last night in my which wife surely wondered why I was watching an old Sandra Bullock film and could probably even identify which one it was. If I follow that in short succession with The Heat, The Lake House and While You Were Sleeping, I'll probably have some 'splaining to do.

Retroactively non-fatal

The following post contains spoilers about The Lost City.

When I sided with my one son over my other son and picked The Lost City over Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore for our Easter Monday viewing, I knew I was taking a minor content risk. The film is rated M by the Australian ratings scale, which means it's supposed to be appropriate for children over 15. 

My younger son is barely half that old, so it may seem like bad parenting of the highest order to expose him to this. But you have to consider that movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home are also rated M, and we've pretty much opened the floodgates to all Marvel movies, even for the eight-year-old. I'm still hemming and hawing on the Avengers movies, which get pretty intense as they go along, but he's already expecting to see Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in a few weeks, and I don't expect to stand in his way.

Besides, an obvious corollary for The Lost City seemed to be Uncharted, which we watched a couple months back, which he handled just fine -- with the exception of the single "graphic" scene in that movie. But even that scene didn't scar him and I would have been happy to accept about that much "graphic" content in The Lost City.

Which is what I was expecting. A parental guide I read online said that there was a shooting, but that it had a "happy resolution." I didn't realize at the time that this was kind of a spoiler, but they were vague about it and didn't even mention who got shot, or what that happy resolution was.

Well, the shooting victim in question was Brad Pitt's Jack Trainer, who appears in what amounts to an extended cameo. (That's also a spoiler, unless you've seen the trailers, which give it away.) And it's actually pretty graphic.

When he disappears from view after being taken out by a sniper's bullet, you don't see him again. But you do see parts of him. Namely, his blood spatters on nearby Channing Tatum, and it's not just blood, but some viscera as well. In fact, the writers could not resist some panicked dialogue from Tatum in which he talks about the character's brains being on his face and in his mouth.

I grimaced. My eight-year-old son did not need this.

But the parent guide had said there was a happy resolution to the issue, and indeed, I was not surprised to see the character pop up in the middle of the closing credits, apparently fine to the naked eye as he drops in on our other two leads during their yoga class. Tatum mentions the brains again, and Trainer quips "We only use ten percent of our brain anyway. I'm just using a different ten percent."

So the movie's one gruesome death was retroactively ruled not to be a death.

I immediately started wondering: Does this change my son's impression of how violent the movie was?

For starters, I should say that my son seemed far more disturbed by the scene where Sandra Bullock picks leeches off Tatum's back and butt. And I don't think the bare butt was the concern. He just finds leeches gross, and I don't blame him. 

He did seem okay with the shooting. At the end he told me it wasn't possible, if someone got part of their brains blown out they probably couldn't survive. He's not wrong, though I suppose some brain loss is survivable.

Knowing right away I might want to write this post, I asked him on our way out of the theater whether knowing that the character survived changed his impression of that moment after the fact. Sure, he was led for the whole movie to believe that he'd watched a man get his brains blown out, but now that he knew that wasn't what happened, and the man was alive making jokes in a yoga class, did that change his impression of the graphic content itself?

He told me that it didn't. He was pretty firm on that topic and couldn't be swayed from it. But it didn't seem to disturb him much either, so that's good.

I suppose if you want to fake out the audience that a character died, you have to reveal the fakeout fairly soon afterward, otherwise the trauma of that moment will live with that viewer for the rest of the movie -- even as he or she may be having fun with, and enjoying, the rest of the movie.

For a great example how to do this, you need to go to another Bullock movie: Speed. This contains one of the great fakeouts in movie history, where the Bullock-driven bus hits a baby carriage as a woman, presumably the mother, is pushing it across the street. You have long enough to watch the carriage hurtle through the air, an instant pit of nausea in your stomach, before the carriage crashes harmlessly to the street, spilling only the aluminum cans it was carrying. You only have to live with the possibility of a dead infant for about five seconds.

"Killing" a character and then bringing him back an hour later during a totally unwarranted and frankly unbelievable end credits sequence is not the same kind of fakeout. If you didn't want us to think of this loveable rogue as having died, don't give us an hour to sit with his death, his brains splattered all over Channing Tatum and our mourning consciousness.